


The End Is Where We Begin

by stellary



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-11-29
Packaged: 2017-11-19 16:22:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellary/pseuds/stellary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q acts recklessly under the weight of guilt. Bond isn't much better off yet is tasked with talking him out of it. This won't go wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I make no moneyz so hold your lawyerz.  
> Unbeta'd and not Brit-picked.  
> 

+

As MI6 operations go, the one codenamed after a medieval stone mansion in a fog-covered Scottish countryside—which was not so metaphorically wiped off the map _overnight_ —carries with it an unusually high amount of guilt and regret. 

There is the rookie field agent forced to pull a trigger and ended up shooting her colleague (worse, a legend), and who later will choose to forego the field entirely (‘It’s not for everyone’). 

There is the young, haughty quartermaster who was very very clever but just a touch too eager to impress and ended up making a big fucking mistake (‘Shit shit shit’) that saw an evil man escape. 

There is the older field agent who came back from the dead but not without holes in his body and doubts on his mind. He killed the evil man in the end but not so soon that it counted. (He’s the one who lost everything and the sky.)

Then there is the silver-headed lady who lived as a single letter and liked neither poetry nor regret. Did she suspect that she’d had a hand in shaping the monster (‘Soon your future will be as nonexistent as your past’), did she think she deserved her fate? Well, the answer will never be clear even if we wait.

Skyfall— _done_.

+

When Bond eventually resumes active duty after a second round of tests, evals and a political firestorm, for a while, every time Q looks into the older man’s eyes he remembers that moment in which Bond realised before _he_ did that they had been hacked. But Q doesn’t divert his gaze, just types and types.

+

Bond plays his part, more convincingly than ever. Killer on a tightrope with a whisper in his ear and winter in his eyes, all katana-sharp suits and radioactive blue. His humanity in tatters, one suspects 007 is attempting to hold it together with elevated brutality and denial of human warmth which is, plainly, doing a better job tearing down than stitching up. And there is nothing left to bring him down at the end of that rope. 

However, for all the havoc he wreaks in all the shadowy corners of the world, his quartermaster beats him in getting pulled into a non-routine meeting with a stern M first. 

They bump into each other outside the door to M’s office, Q nods but doesn’t pause.

“What’s the matter with him?” Bond asks Moneypenny.

She raises one impeccably shaped eyebrow and says without any actual surprise in her voice.

“You didn’t know? Q hijacked an attack drone from the Ministry of Defense in order to save your sorry arse, 007.” 

+

The next time, Q blacks out half of Riga to distract the local police. 

Then there’s that phony bomb alert in the UN building before everyone, including the heads of three states, have to be evacuated.

_Amazing what a single computer can do._

+

Eve finds Bond at the shooting range. 

“You have got to go talk to Q.”

Bond raises his weapon—bang! Bang! Bang! Then asks, “Might I ask why?”

“He’s setting fire to his career by acting reckless because he’s still consumed by guilt over Silva’s hack-in and believes he’s got M’s blood on his hands.”

“We all have blood on our hands.”

She invades his personal space at this and hisses, “Q isn’t one of _us_.”

Bond takes in her anger and exhales softly. “There isn’t anything I can do. He’ll have to come ‘round on his own.”

“He could use some help. I’ve tried but he wouldn’t let me.”

“What makes you think he’ll let me?”

“Bond,” here her face softens and her voice goes almost mother-gentle. “All those things that's got him into trouble, he did them to keep _you_ alive.”

+

It’s past three in the morning, and there’s a shadow in his flat. 

Q plops down his messenger bag on the sofa, doesn’t switch on the lights, just insouciances, “now I know how she must have felt.”

The shadow offers, “at least you are taking it a lot better than she ever did.”

“I suspect it’s because she knew this was never a good sign.” With that the lights do come on and Bond blinks. 

“To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Bond makes an expansive gesture encompassing all of Q. “You.”

“You’ll have to be more verbose than that.”

“Moneypenny thinks you are heading for a crash course.”

“I see. She put you up to this?”

“Practically served me a browbeating.”

“And you agreed because you are frightened of her?”

“Well, she did shoot me once.”

Unexpectedly, Q stiffens. Then—“It wasn’t her fault.”

Bond moves away from the window towards Q, his eyes glimmering like jewel.

“It wasn’t yours, either.”

And Q knows Bond isn’t talking about Istanbul any more.

“Here to baby-glove me? A bit rich coming from you, is it not?”

“Q.”

“I know what happened to you after Vesper and _she_ was most decidedly not your fault.”

Bond’s eyes turn 007-cold but Q can’t help himself.

“Yes, she and Fields and Mathis, and the capture-or-kill order on you, I know about them all. Now why don’t you leave me the fuck alone. I haven’t even murdered anyone.”

And he blinks, once, before finding himself pinned against the wall, iron fingers wrapped around his throat, but he really can’t help himself, _now_. 

“They were touched by your hand, then withered under your feet. You still remember them, do you not? I’m sure they all went gladly.” Q chokes out. He doesn’t know what he’s saying any more. He feels the fingers tighten.

_Good. Now he’s free to do his worst._


	2. Chapter 2

+

Bond comes back from Belize. While the objective has been achieved, the body count sees the foreign minister sitting in at the debriefing, seething. He issues an ultimatum: 

“If you carry on with this behavior, I will take away your 00 status, and I can make you unemployable on this planet. Remember this, 007.”

Bond looks at him dead in the eye and lies through his teeth, smiling. “Yes, sir.”

After the meeting, Eve catches up with Q in the corridor. 

“What did you do to Bond?”

Q carries on walking as he non-replies, “he’s perfectly capable of inflicting damage on himself without any outside help.”

“I know he’s been to your place,” she’s got the look of someone who knows that violence isn’t the answer to the question yet nonetheless hopes that sometimes it could be. “What happened between you two?”

“Shouldn’t have sicced him on me if you couldn’t take the consequences.”

She cuts him off with a sharp move and gets in his face, eyes fierce like hot coal. “I’m trying to be a friend to you, Q. Don’t act like I’m the enemy. If there’s any enemy around, it’s in _here_ ,” she jabs him on his forehead with one finger, and stomps off.

Q watches her disappear, and the impassive mask slips into something that looks like guilt. He’s got so much of it inside of him by now he feels like his body is just an empty host. Why not? Let them feast.

As to what happened between him and Bond... 

+

_Now he’s free to do his worst._

_The overhead lighting painted the sneer on Bond’s face as he pinned Q in place against the wall with one hand around the throat and one forearm on the collar bone, cold anger flaring in his eyes._

__Blunt instrument,_ Q thought._

_But then Bond ground out, “you want punishment, do it yourself, or get somebody else to do it. Don’t you fucking think you can manipulate_ me _into doing your dirty work,” before releasing the pressure suddenly, entirely, that it felt like abandonment._

_It could have been panic, and there was probably desperation—one of Q’s hands shot up, almost on its own volition, and grabbed Bond’s shirt collar before Q’s mouth violently mashed onto Bond’s._

_Q thought,_ There goes my promising career in espionage _._

 _Bond thought,_ Take the bloody shot _._

_When the bullet-fast moment was over, they stood face to face. Bond was bleeding from his lip and Q could taste the copper on his tongue._

_Bond wiped the blood off with one finger and said, his voice as icy as his eyes, “we are done here.”_

+

It’s been twenty four days and he can still taste the blood in his mouth.

+

Bond closes the door behind him and walks into the sitting room of his severely disused flat. 

He draws and points his weapon the same time someone flips on a light switch.

“Don’t think you want to put a hole in me,” Q intones cooly. “Too much paperwork.” He is dressed, for once, in a suit jacket, albeit rumpled and slightly ill-fitting.

“Not if I quit.”

“You won’t. Anything else is far too unglamorous and dull.”

Bond lowers the Walther, says evenly, “speak for yourself.” Then, with a shade of impatience creeping into his voice he asks. “What do you want?”

Q looks at him, unblinking, quiet.

“What _do_ you want from me,” Bond repeats, evidently quite near the end of his rope.

Q makes a curiously helpless gesture, and Bond just notices now that the younger man is a bit unsteady on his feet, as well his cheeks and neck are flushed, as if he’s been drinking. 

Hell.

“I had a chat with Camille Montes,” the quartermaster blurts out.

Bond’s eyes narrow. “ _Why_?”

Q waves a hand as if to say ‘That’s not important,’ then continues. “She told me about how you almost shot her, in the fire.”

And now there is a fire in Bond’s eyes. “For fuck’s sake, are you still on about that? I get it, I’ve got the withering touch, everybody around me dies. What do you want me to do, kill myself?”

In fury, he reaches for the Walther.

Q lunges towards him, hits him with full-body impact, and they land on the floor in a tangle of limbs with Q on top of Bond. The weapon is knocked away as well as the desk lamp, plunging the room into darkness.

When Q’s lips find Bond’s, this time, there is insistence but no violence, urgency but no despair and heat without the tang of copper. In fact, the gentleness in it is almost too much for Bond to stand. 

Kiss. _M._

Kiss. _Fields._

Kiss. _Mathis._

Kiss. _Vesp—_

Q tastes like whisky and spring.

“What do you want from me,” Bond asks again, low and rough. He won’t open his eyes. 

Q murmurs, “you didn’t let me finish, 007.” He hovers a palm over Bond’s mouth as if to insure the wholeness of the statement he’s about to make. 

“Camille said she asked you once, ‘Is this what you do for your friends,’ when you dumped Mathis’ body in a skip and took money from his wallet after he died in your arms.”

Bond makes no attempt to rebuke, as if he’s too tired to even defend his soul.

“She tells me she’s figured out the answer, which is—you leave a piece of yourself with them. You told her the dead didn’t care about vengeance, but you did. And that’s your prison.” 

Q’s voice is uncannily steady and clear when he says, “what I want from you is _everything_ , 007.”

Bond gives a laugh that sounds like a bark. “I have nothing left.” 

He feels fingertips—tracing up his jaw line, the shell of his ears. Then the lips are back, soft and light, a slender tongue, too, to unlock his teeth.

He’s not wearing his earwig, but he hears the familiar whisper. “That is for me to judge.”

+

A quartermaster watches over his spy and keeps him alive.

The spy listens to his quartermaster and comes back intact. (Or he tries.)

Intrigue surrounds them but never between them. 

Worlds crumble. Fine. _Let it come down_.

The others can have all that, the two of them will take the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the best I could do. Argh. I re-watched _Quantum of Solace_ and wanted to address Mathis' death and Camille's question. Thanks for reading.


End file.
